No Longer Hidden: Dialogues on Accessible Curation

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Accompanied by upbeat rock music, the man in a wheelchair is pushed to the edge of a pool. Falling into the water, his body suddenly comes to life, rolling over to reveal his slender legs. Cheers and whistles ring from the side. “When we were there, there was no outside world,” recalls a narrator’s voice.

In the poster of Crip Camp, a man standing with a guitar on his shoulder is pushing the wheelchair of a man with his legs crossed. Behind them is a country road, several white houses, and a lush forest © Netflix

This is a scene in Crip Camp, a documentary about a summer camp for disabled teens in the United States in the 1970s. The hippies who embraced physical and mental freedom in the camp became the backbone of the country’s disability rights movement in the following decades, forging a revolutionary path toward greater legal protection and social engagement for the disability community.

Teens with disabilities gather on a lawn at the summer camp, sitting in wheelchairs or on the ground © Netflix

The video appeared in the first session of The Hidden Project, an online workshop series on disability arts and accessible curation co-hosted by the Department of Culture and Education of the German Consulate General in Shanghai and the Goethe-Institut in East Asia. The speaker of the day, Sean Lee, is the Director of Programming at Tangled Art + Disability, a gallery in Canada featuring artists with disabilities. Lee joined Dr. Kate Brehme, co-founder of berlinklusion, a Berlin-based arts accessibility network, in leading six online lectures and discussions in the span of three months. Together, they shared their expertise with 42 curators from around East Asia, exploring the possibilities of access and accessibility in the region.

People with disabilities parade through the city streets, with their crutches, wheelchairs, and guide dogs © Netflix

Bringing together an East Asian cohort for the first time, Lee and Brehme paid close attention to the regional differences in disability studies. Although there are people with disabilities across the world, perceptions of disability vary from one country to another. For example, Lee noted in his lectures that disability justice in North America was historically tied to the activism of black, indigenous, and people of color communities, whereas civil rights movements in East Asia rarely centered on race. Rather than assuming a set of universal principles to be applied everywhere, the lecturers presented historical materials such as Crip Camp to introduce the social contexts that gave rise to different disability communities in the West, putting their curatorial practices into perspective. “I didn’t want to replicate the Western colonial preaching model and tell people ‘This is how you should do it,’” Brehme said in an interview. Instead, she encouraged the program’s participants to reflect on their own cultural environments and share their respective work experiences during each session, ensuring an equal exchange between the instructors and the participants.

For Miyuki Tanaka, a Japanese independent curator, this exchange could also be extended to the participants’ own community, forging connections within the East Asian region. “It’s already a rare opportunity to discuss accessible curation, even more so with people of similar traditions and values.” In her view, the cultural lineage shared in East Asia could help the participants join efforts to find a foothold for the Western-based concepts of disability in the East Asian context. “Learning from the West is important, but we also need to have our own voice,” she said.

The Hidden Project provided simultaneous interpretation between five languages to and from English, allowing the participants to listen and express themselves in their preferred languages @ The Hidden Project

However, meeting online, rather than in person, created barriers for The Hidden Project to facilitating such an in-depth interaction. Yet even as video conferencing was a concession in order to operate under COVID restrictions, it broadened the program’s inclusion which may have otherwise been limited to economically developed countries. Mungunchimeg Bat-Erdene from the National Art Gallery of Mongolia recalled the first session: “By then, it was already late in Mongolia, but I was very excited about the program, so I turned on my computer early and waited in front of the screen.” As the meeting began, just listening to the other participants introduce their backgrounds felt like an inspiration. “I hope that one day I can contribute to making art accessible and be as confident as they are,” she said.

The Hidden Project made accessibility services for its participants a priority. At the beginning of each session, the instructors gave brief descriptions of their physical appearance—a practice initially developed to serve people with low vision. Lee believes that such actions transcend “assumptions of who is present and participating in these spaces.” With more widespread use, they can help solidify the treatment of disabled people as regular members of the community. 

When describing their appearance, sighted people often use the vocabulary of color. During one class discussion, Dr. Kojiro Hirose from Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology, a blind participant in The Hidden Project, remarked: “I don’t remember the color of my shirt. So instead of describing the color, I’m more interested in how it feels in my hand.” This shift in senses made a strong impression on another participant of the program, Liz Ho Man Young, an art consultant based in Hong Kong, and expanded the horizon of her sensory perception: “When we let go of our habits, what are the other ways to interpret the world and express ourselves?"

The exploration of multisensory experiences is also an interest held by The Hidden Project’s keynote speaker Dr. Amanda Cachia. Based on her observation, accessibility services in museums are often an afterthought—supplemental materials such as Braille and visual description are seldom an integral part of the exhibition and thus easily left behind. Therefore, she proposes “creative access” for curators to embody access from the very beginning of the exhibition’s conception. For example, an innovative stimulation of the viewer’s senses can be both a component of the exhibition’s intellectual framework and considerate of disabled people’s bodily experiences—not only meeting the practical needs of disabled visitors but also sparking the curators’ creativity.

In the 2014 exhibition “Composing Dwarfism: Reframing Short Stature in Contemporary Photography” curated by Dr. Amanda Cachia at Space4Art Center in San Diego, USA, the works were hung lower than usual for visitors who have dwarfism, combining accessible design with curation © Art in America

When an exhibition amplifies a certain channel of creative expression, conflicts and compromises are inevitable. For example, Dr. Hirose, from Japan, suggested that touch-based artworks should be displayed in a dark room to enhance the visitors’ tactile sensations. By rejecting the vison-oriented norm in art exhibitions, this approach foregrounds the experience of blind people, though it may risk turning away viewers who fear the darkness.

The artist’s intention can also create an obstacle for certain viewers. During a roundtable talk at the “Diverse As We Are” (DAWA) International Festival of Inclusive Culture, Michelle Yeonho Hyun, director and curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai and participant in The Hidden Project, gave an example of a video installation at her museum that required the audience to crawl through a short, narrow door. Although visitors with limited mobility or large bodies could enter through an upright door to the side, this alternative, accessible route appeared to contradict the artist’s motive in simulating a jungle experience in the gallery.

In this screenshot of The Hidden Project roundtable talk, the right side is a row of video windows showing the panelists, and the left side is the speaker’s slideshow, featuring the scene of two visitors squatting in front of the gallery’s short door. The talk was presented in partnership with OCAT Shanghai, the Department of Culture and Education of the German Consulate General in Shanghai, and the Consulate General of Canada in Shanghai © Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai

“It is impossible to meet everyone’s needs,” said Choi Yeon, a Korean curator and participant in The Hidden Project. When building accessibility facilities in art museums, she believes that there are no absolute standards for right or wrong. “As long as we execute our pursuit of accessibility and show our efforts, the disability communities will provide feedback to help us improve,” she said.  Such a feedback mechanism is not just a conduct checklist for curators to obey; it is an interdependent collaboration and an evolving process based on introspection and communication.

To enhance this communication, many participants of The Hidden Project are committed to working more closely with people with disabilities—whether as artists to feature in exhibitions, members of their curatorial teams, or consultants in focus groups to evaluate the accessibility services in their institutions.

They are also motivated to address the larger structural issues in society. Liu Ziyuan from the Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts believes that a city’s infrastructure is crucial for disability communities to gain equal access to society. Therefore, she hopes to increase disability awareness in the Academy’s next generation of scholars and designers through enhanced accessibility programming. Dr. Hsin-Yi Chao from the National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan plans use the sociological frameworks introduced in the lectures to analyze the relationship between Taiwan’s governmental initiatives on disability and the society’s mass cultural movements.

The workshop’s instructors, too, have set new aspirations. Dr. Brehme is conducting comparative research on the histories of disability in Europe and Asia, especially Germany and Japan. And as a disabled person of Chinese descent, Lee is unpacking the relationship between disability identity and his Chinese diaspora identity, and how these two communities intersect.

Under the ongoing impact of the pandemic, we are more eager than ever to build interpersonal connections. The participants and contributors of The Hidden Project tuned in from four time zones around the world, sometimes early in the morning or late at night. Through their twice-monthly contributions, the program not only celebrated frequently marginalized stories of disability, but also assembled diverse individuals separated by distance yet united in purpose. Together, these stories and individuals navigate between East and West, differences and commonalities, paving the way for a more inclusive future.

Author

Sue Mengchen Xu is an art educator and writer. She previously worked in the Department of Access and Community Programs at the Metropolitan Museum, and her writings have appeared in Wallpaper, Artforum, and The World of Chinese, among others.

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